


Pregnant Silence

by ABeckoningCat



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Deaf Character, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Gen, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:23:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABeckoningCat/pseuds/ABeckoningCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint is deafened during a mission, a loss complicated by Natasha’s need to tell him that she's pregnant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pregnant Silence

It was not silence.

He might have been able to deal with silence, strained into it and picked out the faint features of ambient sound and voices, but this was worse.  It was the  _absence_  of silence, a low-level hum perpetually at the fringe of his perception, making him want to crawl the walls and crush a fist to his ear to stem it.  Silence would have been a blessing. 

Of the half-dozen languages Clint Barton knew fluently, American Sign Language was not one.  Chalk it up to a distinct lack of hearing-impaired international assassins, and he’d simply never had a need to learn.  Then the concussion grenade had gone off before any of them expected it, and suddenly he was trapped in a world of  _no silence_ , restless and caged and trapped inside his own head.

Banner was his usual pessimistic self after all the tests were complete; for a genius, he had the bedside manner of an undertaker.

_80%_  said the yellow notepad he held up to him, scrawled with black Sharpie.

“80% will return?” Clint asked, careful of the volume of his own voice.  That would still put him well above an average man’s hearing, at least.  Banner’s expression was uncomfortable as he took the pad back, adding something on to the end.

_80% Loss_

It was Stark who surprised him with the intensity of his reaction.  He didn’t clap him on the back and tell him everything would be fine, didn’t offer baseless platitudes or try to make uncomfortable conversation.  He said only one thing to him, and that with a firm hand on his shoulder and an iron look in his dark eyes.

“Barton.  I will fix this.”

Clint had no idea what he’d been doing in his workshop since then, but whatever it was had kept him more than preoccupied.

Natasha was, of course, Natasha.  She scrawled messages to him on the small whiteboard he reluctantly stole from one of Stark’s accounting offices, catching his eye with small gestures so that he would read.

_So now I can call you crass names whenever I want?_

This was her way of letting him know it changed nothing.

“You do that anyway,” he reminded her.

_But now I can do it in English._

This became their evening ritual, no more barbs traded on the training room floor but hours spent shoulder-to-shoulder on his bed – he propped up on pillows, she half-reclined alongside him, passing the whiteboard back and forth.  She wrote, he spoke, if only to get familiar with the modulation of his own voice.  There was a long road ahead of him, a world of uncertainty as any kind of Avenger, and these were the nights that let him sleep  _easier_ , if not exactly  _easily_.

And then Natasha too began to withdraw.

 

 

Loving Natasha Romanoff was not like crossing the border into Canada, all friendly smiles and polite inquiries about vacation plans.  Oh, there was planning, but it involved knowledge of when the guard detail was most relaxed, the weak spots and the breaks in the wall.  He hadn’t sauntered into her affections, he’d belly-crawled through mud under a length of razor wire to get there, and where other men enjoyed puppy love he had to suffer the frothing bite of German Shepherds straining at their leashes.

But it had always been worth it.  On the other side, her heart was beautiful country.

Now the guards were up again, pacing the wall, and he couldn’t find a place to break through.  She handed the whiteboard back to him when he demanded she write something, pursing her lips and shaking her head in tense defiance.  As if she too had gone deaf he scrawled in tall black letters, holding it out at her with his jaw set and his eyes hard.

_Talk to me_.

She made dismissive motions, fed him apologetic little looks before thrusting her hands back through her blood red hair and walking away.  She was not a woman who kept secrets from him, but now the burden of something hidden, something deeply cached, weighed on her like an old and ill-fit mantle.

When Natasha pulled away, Tony pulled in close, began ambushing the archer at times and in ways that made him flinch and feint with an arrow in one hand.

“Easy there, Cupid—let me see your ear—“

Clint tried to duck out from under his reach, brows gathered in tight suspicion, but Stark had mastered the coin-from-behind-the-ear-trick years before.  Suddenly he was doubled on his knees, clutching his skull in a world of pain.  The scream of feedback was like no agony he’d ever felt before, a blade of pure sound plunged through his eardrum.

Whatever he’d thrust into his ear, Tony took it back just as quickly, standing back to make frowning adjustments in the cup of one palm.

“Hm. That worked better than expected.”  He flashed a dry smile at him, turning away again as his eyes passed over the nearly prostrated archer.  “Thanks. Carry on.”

Now with a ringing in his ear besides, Clint blearily sought out Natasha, foregoing the whiteboard in anticipation of her silence.  He found her leaning on the balcony off the Quinjet’s landing pad, her hair caught in the wind, and for the first time in days she turned without hesitation to the sound of his voice.

“Stark’s trying to kill me.”

Her gaze flicked over him, the way he ducked his head and rubbed sorely at one ear, forehead creased and eyes upturned.  He could be curiously boyish for one with a kill count nearly as high as her own.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “He does that.”

There was the smallest shift in the fix of his eyes, an adjustment she usually registered when someone looked at her tits and though they were being subtle about it.  But it wasn’t her chest he was looking at, it was the movement of her lips.  Natasha hesitated, circled a finger near her mouth.

“Can you read this?  What I’m saying?”

Clint let one shoulder rise and drop, let his eyes blink slowly.   _A little_.

After a heavy pause she started towards him, curling her fingers through his palm with a tug.   _Come_.

There were cameras everywhere.   _Everywhere._   The corridors, the common rooms, their individual apartments.  Natasha had been particularly displeased to see the small black eye of a lens peering out from one of the locker room showers, and since then had made it her personal quest to find all the Tower’s blind spots.  Not only for reasons of security, but for moments like this, when she simply needed to be out from under every eye, physical and digital.

Their personal quarters were out.  The training room was out.  Certainly not the showers.  Answering his questioning tugs with only an occasional, reassuring look back, Natasha dragged him up and up and up, beyond the still ongoing reconstruction, into the wind-battered floors still laid with plywood and hung with curtains of filmy plastic.  The cable wiring for the cameras had been laid here, but no cameras.

Clint was usually the one who sought out the high places, and that she took him here of her own volition made him instantly edgy.  Natasha hated heights the way he hated the snow… it was a small wonder they’d discovered any common ground at all.

She released him as the fire door shuddered closed behind them, tucking her hands into her back pockets as she crossed the dusty plywood, casting the floor for loose screws to kick.  Clint merely watched her back, arms relaxed but hands reflexively opening and closing, wishing for a bow.

“Nat,” he prompted finally, unsure if she was speaking to him and he simply couldn’t hear it.  When she looked back, however, he had a sense she’d been silent all the while.  He raised his brows, opening his palms at her.  “Talk to me?”

She turned away again, drew her hands from her pockets, slowly turned to face him.  In his silent movie world he saw her lips shape out words, move timidly and carefully, as if the movement of them would betray her.  And he looked – studied them with a frown – but had to shake his head in confusion.

“I can’t… say it again?”  Fuck, why hadn’t he thought to grab the board, a pen and paper, anything.  He stepped nearer, focused this time.  She tried again, enunciating more carefully, but the archer registered only confusion.

“…you’re… bragging?”  His hands opened helplessly.  “You’re bacon.  This is what you’re telling me, that you’re bacon?”

And she didn’t want to, absolutely hated herself for it, but her expression split in a moment of laughter.  Clint grinned back weakly, appealingly.  He hadn’t realized how long he’d been waiting for her to laugh.  “Help me out, Romanoff.  You want me to give up pork, what?”

Settling for a wry smile, she reached back into her pocket, this time drawing out a fold of paper.

_Paper_ , he thought in relief.  He even began patting himself down for a pen.  But by the time he found one tucked into the front corner of his jeans she had the sheet open, turning it toward him with what looked like a bad photocopy, a white hurricane smear on a field of black.

He didn’t even realize what it was until she held it by the top corners, pinning it flush against her stomach.

The pen dropped, bouncing off plywood as his eyes opened wide at her.  He took a single step nearer, saw the trembling of her hands as she held the ultrasound in place, saw the pressure of her teeth against her bottom lip.

She began to say, “I didn’t know how to—“ but he never made out the rest.  All at once she was off her feet, his arms fast around her, and she clutched at his shoulders as he spun her in a circle.  He felt her laugh, felt the cinch of her arms as she bent her head to his and hugged his neck, felt the subsiding thunder of her heart as he lowered her back to her feet.  The paper crinkled between them, pinned in place, and he snapped at it quickly, holding it up closer inspection.

  
Natasha let him have the moment, fingertips stretching toward him, following the deep, parenthetical curves around his smile.

“How long?” he asked suddenly, smile fading.  He was a boy again, counting the days left towards Christmas, trying to work out just how good he’d have to be between now and then.  She saw it all in the crease of his forehead – the excitement and the worry, the sudden dawning of responsibility.

“Four months,” she said carefully, forming the words slowly, and held up four fingers so there would be no misunderstanding.  His eyes flashed away, then back to her.

“October?”

She nodded.  His shoulders sagged with a sigh, the thought overwhelming him, and she took his chin in one hand, making him look at her.

“Hey… it’s OK, right?”  She nodded, looked hopeful.

“No, wh—are you kidding?  We’re going to raise a kid here?  Did I not just tell you that Stark tried to  _kill_  me?”  He split with another small grin, hands at her hips as he jostled her.  “Yes.  Yes, it’s great.  It’s amazing.  It’s… it’s fucking  _terrifying_ , but it’s great.”  And then, with a slightly wider smile. “We’re now totally calling this kid ‘bacon’ until he’s old enough to complain about it.  You know that, right?”

“She,” she corrected, and again his face fell in surprise, head tilting forward as if to be sure he caught the movement of her lips just right.  She nodded, affirmative.

“Bacon Barton,” he said.

“Clint.  Clint, no.”

His arms wrapped about her waist again, hefting her straight off her feet as he carried her back to the fire door.

“Fine.  Bacon Barton-Romanoff.”

“You’re not…even remotely helping—", she protested, but his attention was on the door, struggling it open as he held her off the ground with the other arm, body leaned back for leverage.  He gave her a final, quick grin as he got it open, finally resetting her on her feet.

“We’re having a kid.  It’s fucking  _crazy_ , right?”

“Crazy,” she repeated, mouth curling on one side.  “That’s a word for it.”

“I like crazy,” he defended.  “I’m in love with crazy.”

“Yeah,” she gave his shoulder a gentle push, moving him back towards the stairs.  “I know the feeling.”


End file.
